


Motion Sickness

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Break Up, F/F, SGRUB, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 21:45:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes her monologues began to drown your own thoughts, a soothing, overwhelming white noise to your consciousness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Motion Sickness

You always feel sick when you go between gates. Five, six, seven, eight times and you still feel your stomach jump up in your throat, churning and trying to jettison its contents out through your mouth.

You close your eyes, but not fast enough to avoid the searing burn from the sharp change of colors, cutting deep into your thinkpan. When you spend weeks with a trichromatic landscape at best and suddenly the world’s palette changes, it messes with you. These worlds aren’t just aesthetically offensive; they’re a downright assault to your senses.

Worst of all, you feel disoriented. Lost. You land on your feet, somehow, and wonder where you are. It’s ridiculous, you acknowledge, since moments ago you knew. You knew exactly where you were going and now that you’re here…

A soft chorus of ribbits reminds you. You inhale deeply. As you hold your breath, you force yourself to blink. Your eyes want to stay shut, but they slowly begin to adjust, and each glance to the world is slightly less painful and offensive than the last. You exhale all in a rush. You’re home again, in a sense, standing on the impossibly soft ground of the Land of Moss and Frogs.

Your improving but still-precarious sense of calm is toppled when you hear Aranea’s voice again.

 

~~~

 

You used to take solace in that voice. When Meenah was sowing trouble and Kankri wouldn’t cease with his tiresome rambling about the hemospectrum, hearing someone talk about something grounded in the current reality was a much-needed relief.

Hours every day, you listened to her talk. As you two traveled and fought together, she talked about Sgrub, about the universe, about ancient Beforian legends, about history, about anything and everything, with interpersonal nonsense only an occasional topic. Such a manageable amount of drama.

Sometimes her monologues began to drown your own thoughts, a soothing, overwhelming white noise to your consciousness. Nothing in them irked you. No self-righteousness, no social statement, no romantic whinings, no cry for pity. You could handle any of those, and they all had their place, but whereas they were the grubsauce slathered liberally on everyone else’s daily bread, Aranea used them as an occasional condiment.

The cadence of her voice was almost sing-song. Emotive, passionate, neither too shrill nor too deep. It broke the silence in remote corners of worlds too desolate and too artificial to have their own music.

 

~~~

 

It was cliche, how you quieted her the first time, but it worked. You’d been intimately acquainted with concuscipient relations before. She was still new to them, blushing blue when you pulled away from that first kiss under gentle gray skies.

Behind her pointed white-framed glasses, something glimmered in her eyes as you smiled at her, your lips still sensitive from the kiss. You thought her look was flushed affection, the beginnings of love for you.

Looking back later, you thought you misinterpreted. It was just the love of attention.

It’s not fair of you to think, but nothing’s fair in love or Sgrub.

 

~~~

 

“Our new world is going to be beautiful. I can’t wait to see the Genesis Tadpole!”

You nodded noncommittally as you wiped your knitting needles clean. Tiny bits of something gummy still stuck to them them even after killing minions. The bulk of their bodies transformed into grist, but you’d learned by now that the process wasn’t perfect.

“When are you going to go back to search for more of the frogs you need? Everyone’s been making good progress with the gates.”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Porrim! How could you not? We have so much more to do.” She folded her arms across her breasts and gave you a look that would have been more appropriate on a disapproving lusus than on a friend or lover.

Fighting monsters was much more your style than running after little creatures and breeding, caste be damned. But the game didn’t care what your preference was. Aranea didn’t care what your preference was.

 

~~~

 

“This quadrant isn't working out for us.” It was easy to say. Your throat didn’t constrict; you felt no outpouring of emotion nor tension as she opened her mouth to reply. That alone should have told you enough.

“What! How so?” Aranea’s eyes went wide, the corners of her lips turned down in worry. “If you had concerns, you should have told me!”

You didn’t want a discussion; you didn’t want her to talk you out of it. You were done.

But she talked, and you were too polite to stop her. And logically, she made sense, so much sense. The little unsettled feeling in you cooled, steam blown off by the endless stream of words, the loquacious explanations, the plurality of alleged solutions and suggestions.  
You couldn’t argue your way out of this, nor did you have the will to. When you saw how hopeful she looked, how cautiously proud her glimmer of smile was, how composed and eloquent she was, you remembered why you’d liked her so much. You gave in.

But you’d meant what you said. And as much as intellectually you saw why Aranea was to be admired, that warm, heady feeling never came back. You went through the motions and occasionally, tantalizingly, for a moment you felt something you could have sworn was flushed affection again. But it wasn’t really there. Your heart was no longer in it.

She seemed not to notice.

 

~~~

 

Every time you hooked your fingers under the thick, white straps of her bra, she looked away. The first time, it made you grin. You pulled on them slowly, down her arms to her elbows, until you could strip the whole garment off her chest, revealing her large, rounded tits with soft cerulean nipples.

The second time, you released the left strap with your hand and place a finger up to rest under her chin. You tilted her face towards yours, but she shut her eyes, a meek little smile below tightly scrunched eyelids. She didn’t open them even as you, slightly puzzled but wanting to be patient, began to caress her face.

The third time, you made a gentle comment, which she answered with an entire paragraph about how sensations are heightened with sensory deprivation. She spoke like she was the adventurous one and you the conservative, all the while keeping her eyes closed behind those glasses she would never take off.

The fourth time, you rolled your eyes as you tossed her bra to the floor. She didn’t notice, of course, and you didn’t feel as bad about the gesture as you thought you might.

The fifth time, you didn’t bother taking her bra off at all.

 

~~~

 

“I’m just trying to help!”

“Aranea, I appreciate the gesture but I don’t always need your help.”

“Oh no, Porrim, I’m not trying to insinuate that you’re incompetent! Not that at all! We have to work together on this and utilize our respective strengths. For example, I’m not half as good as killing imps as you are, but I would never suggest that you think that I _need_ your help!”

“Allow me to clarify. I don’t _want_ your help. Sometimes I need to make my own decisions without being heavily advised about what I allegedly should be doing.”

You can’t hear yourself think over her voice.

You can’t think over her voice.

Your motions have become automated. You feel more like an Imperial drone, moving robotically as you cut down minions with your chainsaw. The adrenaline is still there but it feels like a chemical rather than the sweet, heart-pounding fear of before.

She’s always talking tactics, plans, strategies, whether there’s one or whether you’re surrounded. Whether you happen across a single imp or whether you spend hours fending off ogres. It doesn’t even register to you any more.

 

~~~

 

Each planet smells different but the strong scent of ginger and chamomile and something sweet follows you everywhere. She won’t leave you alone.

 

~~~

 

“You went through the wrong gate again!”

“Aranea.”

“I’m glad I caught up with you! You ended up on the completely wrong side of the planet. You really need to get working on finding the rest of those frogs now. If you don’t, this session might not successfully create a new universe! We definitely don’t want that.”

“Aranea.”

“I’ll go with you and give you a hand getting started. I can even help with the tadpole! Widowsprite gave me some interesting insight into the intricacies of the process, and if we find your sprite as well we can further delve into it. I really don’t know why you let her leave your side so often, when she’s such a wellspring of valuable knowledge.”

“Aranea.”

“Oh don’t worry, after we start making some solid progress on the frog front, we’ll still have plenty of time to ourselves!”

You don’t return her smile. You can’t. It doesn’t even look real to you anymore. Does she think that’s going to motivate you?

She takes your hand. Her hand is cool. Too cool. In a flash of annoyance, it occurs to you that you never really understood the appeal of dating up the hemospectrum. You don’t like the cold.

You pull back.

Her expression deflates as her arm falls back down to her side. Her mouth droops with her little fangs pointing out.

“No,” you say, to nothing and everything in particular.

She tries to explain again. You can hear it all before she’s a syllable in; you know the ins and outs of her speech. Her soliloquizing.  
You can hear everything, but you can’t listen anymore.

“I know where I’m going, and I know what I’m doing.” You exhale. “I know what I’m choosing.”

You’re choosing space to breathe.

You’re choosing to reopen the well-greased, revolving doors of your quadrants to let in something equally disappointing, but at least disappointing in a different way.

You’re choosing to be done with this.

You regretted staying but you know you won’t regret leaving.

You won’t regret it much at all.

Only a little bit.

**Author's Note:**

>  _And you think you've figured out everything_  
>  _I think I know my geography pretty damn well_  
>  _You say what you need so you'll get more_  
>  _If you could just milk it for everything_  
>  _I've said what I'd said and you know what I mean_  
>  _But I still can't focus on anything_  
>  \- Dramamine, Joshua James (cover of Modest Mouse)


End file.
